Wednesday, 26 February 2014

Six Science Fiction Fortifications

Forts in Science Fiction are
still just forts.

GW ones are not bad at all, but still essentailly just a fort

So far as I know, fortifications
don’t really work very well in modern warfare, not against modern armies
anyway. If technology shifts again and the defensive once again out-strips the
offensive, could we see a renewal of fortifications? I suppose it depends if
the nanotech guys manage to outstrip the fusion guys.

Get a bunch of big iron
asteroids, shape and mine them into long spear shapes, about the thickness of
an office block and three times as long. Use advanced tech to mine inside the
asteroid, creating a series of rooms and passages that interconnect, carved out
of the metallic rock.

Then line them up in orbit, select
where you want your new fortifications. Drop them.

Firstly the impact destroys any
enemy present and embeds the iron spear two-thirds deep into the ground. It creates
a crater around it. The part sticking out should remain too hot for any
survivors to occupy till your forces turn up.

Then get inside the iron spire
through one of the holes you left. Turn it into a fortress of meteoric stone.
The crater wall can be fortified to become the curtain wall. The entries now
underground can be a starting point to expand the fort beneath the earth. The shocked
geology of the impact site can turn soft loos soils into packed earth that will
bear a tunnel.

British WWI mining in a nutshell, we blow up Germans, Germans fortify the crater, repeat till dead.

Do a bunch of them. Instant
defensive line*.

Force-Bubble Pentagram

Star Wars has taught us all that
you do not put a shield generator outside the shield it generates. But if you
wanted to you could do it like this;

Have a large central fort and
five lesser ones surrounding it. Have the central fort generate the force field
for the fort north of it, have that fort generate the field for the one
clockwise,and so-on, round in a circle, right back to the central fort.

Switch and randomese which forts
are generating the fields for which others semi-randomly so observers never
know which ones they need to take out to reach the central fort.

If an outer fort is taken, its
supporting generator can simply drop the shield, exposing it to fire from the
forts on each side, and from the centre, then re-take it.

Heat-Sink Fort

Assuming force fields can absorb
huge amounts of energy but need to disperse it somehow, or at least heat up
doing it, the‘walls’ could be a network
of sharp red-hot heat-dispersal vanes.

The stuff inside the force-field
can be super light or purely anti-infantry as it doesn’t need to absorb any impact
itself. No-one has really take much advantageof how strange forcefield tech could make military installations. Generally
they need to tell a story and the familiar mass-based constructions give the
right military impression as they match what we expect to see.

Imagine something like a star
fort but built from leaves of razor-thin red hot ceramic. Infantry assaulting
through the shield has to work their way through the labyrinth while under fire
from the centre. Like star forts, it would be quite beautiful.

Did you know lots of these had bre-built tunnels radiating out from the walls?

Cannibal Forts

Sci-Fi forts are always coming
under attack from hordes of aliens that assault across open ground. A bunch get
shot, then the pile of bodies gets big enough that they can just run up the
corpse pile and get into hand-to-hand. Because that’s more dramatic.

What if you too advantage of the
biomass and had systems set up to transform the bodies into material to
increase the fort. Wire cages filled with compressed corpses. Power lifters and
cranes. Corpse-compacters. The Ghorids are rumoured to have built a city with
bricks made from the blood of their enemies.

The longer the war goes on, the
bigger the fort gets, increasing with each assault.

Titan Forts

A fallen Titan or Mecha on a
battlefield is effectively a fortification. It provides high ground and broken
terrain. Radiation or emissions can make the surrounding area hazardous. It
already has corridors and fire points, you can scavenge and re-purpose weapons.

Also you are fighting over a
gigantic metal corpse.

Erosion Forts

For a strategy operating in
deep-time. Built to channel the natural erosion of a valley or mountain so that
the shifting of the land forms natural revetments. The sedemanting at a rivers
head could be shaped to create islands in the right places. The erosion of a coastline
could be arranged to create defensive emplacements. (There is a slight
suggestion the Maia were up to this in the Silmarillion

Planned for a battle that may
take place in several thousand years, or to alter the strategic landscape of a
developing or implanted culture. Getting the landscape ready, just in case.

5 comments:

This post is awesome, as is the rest of your blog.I'm your 100th follower! I'd love it if you checked my blog, I'm planning on writing some RPG related posts but I don't really know what to write about.

i thought i would add planet irradiated with fallout but a mobile command train with huge loop under crust keeps moving to avoid nuclear bombardment - ian banks dis this - i would add a nuclear ramjet in orbit for a hundred years spewing out waste like a open air dirty reactor - helps to keep planet foul and can fire hydrogen bombs at aything that moves on surface (mine) - combine both for super horrible planet for mission (radioactive bullion on train?)